Cough Syrup
by Anti-canon
Summary: Stiles and Derek have never really fit properly in society, but maybe they don't need to. Maybe they just need to fit right together, crooked little puzzle pieces making a pointless picture.


**A/N: I write too many fics like this. Really. There's never even really depth to them, I just do it because my brain is a scary place and I may or may not be somewhat attracted to sociopaths. Which scares me a little, but whatever. The point is! Title stolen from Young the Giant's Syrup. I even stole some lines. Quite shamelessly.**

**I don't know what the plan for this fic is exactly, where I want to take it, but I hardly ever do. :P Clearly I needed WIP's to putter along with. In any case, lemme know what you think!**

****_Stiles_

One more spoon of cough syrup now should just about do the trick.

You've been trying to come down for hours, just wanting to finally fall asleep. Two blue tablets with dinner and that was the end of that, goodbye sleep, goodbye black restfulness, goodbye pleasant abyss. Getting these doses right, making the medication behave the way you want, it's like you're Alice- one pill to make you smaller, the other to grow right up through the ceiling. Finding the happy medium's hard, even when you're trying, and lately that's been more than anyone could ask for.

Instead, when you need a high, you pop a little amphetamine and buck right up, get focused, feel like you're not hazing through the day, and when that inevitably leads to insomnia and the jitters, you rely on your good old friend Nyquil to float you down. There's probably some pretty hairy side effects to this kind of self-medication, but at the moment, it doesn't feel like much of a problem. Few things really pull your heartstrings besides an empty orange bottle or when the fridge is under stocked.

It's become a bit of a problem, but you really don't find yourself in much of a tizzy to go and fix it. Losing a mother, it's bound to do a number on any boy, no matter the age or maturity or affliction. Thing was, you waited to go crazy until years later, and by then it was no longer really socially acceptable. Having been something akin to stoic when it would have been proper to have this kind of meltdown, people had assumed you'd taken the whole thing well and managed to move on.

More like you froze in that moment, denied reality for as long as you could, and now that you've thawed out, you're a wreck. Only now, now it's not okay. Now you're supposed to have it together, now you're supposed to be living life for her. But you don't want to. You want to wrap yourself in her clothing, listen to her old records, pull away from the world to preserve her instead. And they let you. They let you, because this is supposedly irrational. You're not grieving according to their standards.

It's fine. You've got friends enough. Blue pills, green liquids, the sickly sweet scent of cannabis, oh yes, you all know each other quite well. They all get you like no one else can. They're great! You indulge in their company more than anyone else's and it's working. When the buzz dies down, then you're not feeling so hot, but it's easily fixable. Just one more spoon of cough syrup now and you should come down. Just one more.

It's bitter when you swallow, but all the best things are. You snigger at your own joke, isn't innuendo fun? Seriously though, what's a guy got to do to get some cock around here? These are the thoughts that plague you, these are the things you carry with you when the edges turn fuzzy. Vision narrows, senses die, there's a fine line between dreaming and hallucinating. Just an ordinary Tuesday.

* * *

_Derek_

Losing control was never really an option, but faced with the alternative of losing your mind, you figure the rules can bend just this once, just for a little while.

Nothing quite helps the process of letting go, of cutting the tethers like a game of Russian Roulette with the medicine cabinet. Eeny meeny miny mo, let's give some painkillers a go. Washing them down with a swig from the bathroom sink feels super classy, but hey, it's not even your house and you don't feel up to snooping around for the liquor cabinet right now. Instead you reorganize the clothing in the drawers, find a box of sex toys beneath the bed, eat leftover meatballs on the kitchen counter. It's a nice house.

You figure there should be some kind of guilt or shame kicking in right about now, even fear would be a little more normal if you weren't so terrible at feeling particularly empathetic. As it stands you've got two dead parents, a recently offed sister, and an uncle with an acute case of the bad-touch. You cut yourself some slack.

It's not like you ever do anything particularly menacing. So you drew some smiley faces on a couple dildos and engaged in some minor pilfering. It's not exactly nefarious. You're just seeing how the other half lives, or at least that's what you think it's all about. Breaking into "healthy" peoples' natural habitats and seeing what makes them tick, it's a bit of a hobby, bordering on obsession. You never know what you're gonna do when you get there, it's not exactly planned out. Some nights you just sit on the couch, leaf through their books, some nights you fuck yourself with a recently vandalized rubber dick. If you tried to chart the whole event, all you'd get is outliers.

You're polite enough to wash the sheets after yourself, light a candle and open the window to clear the smell. Tonight you might be fixating a little. Who knew a little slice of vanilla life would get you horny? Then again, that might be the crazy talking. You've accepted by now that there's been a little bit of a wiring problem in your head, that a few things got crossed where they weren't supposed to. It's more fascinating, amusing than anything else.

Back when mom and dad were around there were strict rules, guidelines drilled into the very fiber of your being. You were a decent boy, if not an angry one for having to try so hard just to make everyone else feel more comfortable around you. Once Laura took over things changed. No more self-censoring, no more pretending like it wasn't boiling beneath the surface. She made you wear the mask when you were out in public, but at home it was okay to just be you. It scared her sometimes, she told you as much, but she trusted you enough to manage it.

You weren't quite ready for another upset when she was taken, and being tossed to Peter didn't exactly help. Generally it's a bad idea to make two dysfunctional people rely on each other, especially when one of them tries to convince the other that it's normal for an adult man to share beds and showers with his post pubescent nephew. You made it out intact, more or less, even if it meant developing a few bad habits along the way.

Snooping through strangers' houses- eating their food, stealing their clothes, moving around their furniture- it's your kind of a bad habit. Bit of a bigger deal than biting your nails, you know, but hey, gotta think relative, right? In any case, a breach of ethics is a better to a psychotic break. Unless the two are one and the same. Wouldn't that be the best kind of ironic?


End file.
